Windows Keyboards

On Windows, three keyboarding options are available: an IPA Keyman keyboard and keyboards which work through the Windows keyboarding system (MSKLC) for US, UK, FR, DE and PT (Portuguese) keyboard layouts.

IPA Keyman Keyboard

The “IPA Unicode 6.2 (ver 1.4) KMN” keyboard, developed by Martin Hosken, is a mnemonic compiled Keyman 7 keyboard. It is intended to provide a text input method for Unicode-based applications, in order to access IPA characters. Although greatly expanded, the keyboard layout is similar to that provided for the old pre-Unicode SIL IPA93 fonts. Compiled with Keyman 7, this keyboard will also work with Keyman 8.

The keyboard layout is included in the documentation which is a part of this package.

The keyboard in its present state is specific to the “Doulos SIL” and "Charis SIL" fonts, in that it references characters in the private use area. In future releases of Doulos SIL and Charis SIL, a number of these characters are expected to appear in standard positions according to the newest Unicode specification, and the keyboard (and encodings of any documents using those characters) will have to be changed accordingly. This note does not, of course, affect standard (non-PUA) Unicode IPA characters. The keyboard supports up to Unicode 5.1.

Keyman Download

Note

Although these files have a new date on them, there is no change to the ver. 1.4 keyboard. The only change is in the documentation. Africanist upstep and downstep documentation was fixed.

IPA Unicode 1.4

Beginning with version 1.1.4, this keyboard contains a fix for the problem of fast typing reordering keystrokes when using Keyman with TSF. The basic effect of this is to make Keyman do all text input using TSF, rather than a mixture of TSF and ordinary keyboard events. If you use FieldWorks you should upgrade to this version of the keyboard.

The only change to this version is the support for the Africanist upstep and downstep characters U+A71DMODIFIER LETTER RAISED EXCLAMATION MARK, U+A71EMODIFIER LETTER RAISED INVERTED EXCLAMATION MARK and U+A71FMODIFIER LETTER LOW INVERTED EXCLAMATION MARK.

If you download this package, you must have Keyman already installed. You can just double-click IPAUni14.kmp to install the keyboard package. The keyboard layout is available in the IPA Unicode 6.2 (ver 1.4) KMN.pdf and will be available from the Start menu once you have installed the package.

Download this zip file if you prefer to download a zip file rather than a Keyman installer. Keyman must be installed and then you can double-click IPAUni14.kmx to install the keyboard. The keyboard layout is available in the IPA Unicode 6.2 (ver 1.4) KMN.pdf. Full installation instruction are available in welcome.htm (however, the method described in this document may not work if you have a non-US keyboard with an Alt-Gr key).

You may just download the documentation if you wish. In an appendix, this document contains a chart of all IPA characters, IPA numbers and, where available, their Unicode equivalences. It is made available as a separate download for those who wish to use this resource without the keyboard.

IPA MSKLC Keyboard

It was designed to be similar to SIL's IPA Unicode Keyman Keyboard, in that the keystrokes follow a similar layout. In many cases keystrokes are merely reversed. That is, instead of typing n> to get a U+014B, you would type >n. This system is not always possible to maintain using MSKLC since the Keyman keyboard often used more than two keystrokes and this is not allowed using MSKLC. Please read IPA Unicode 6.2 (ver 1.4) MSK.pdf (in the download package) for installation instructions and the keyboard layout. Make sure that you reboot after installing the keyboard.

There are five keyboards, one is based on the US English keyboard layout, another is based on the UK English keyboard layout, another is based on the Brazil Portuguese keyboard, a fourth on the FR French keyboard layout and a fifth on the DE German keyboard layout. The FR and DE keyboards are new and have only been minimally tested. We welcome feedback.

Note

The keyboard in its present state is specific to the “Doulos SIL” and "Charis SIL" fonts, in that it references characters in the private use area. In future releases of Doulos SIL and Charis SIL, a number of these characters are expected to appear in standard positions according to the newest Unicode specification, and the keyboard (and encodings of any documents using those characters) will have to be changed accordingly. This note does not, of course, affect standard (non-PUA) Unicode IPA characters. The keyboard supports up to Unicode 6.2.

Although the documentation does not mention Windows 8, this keyboard should work fine on Windows 8.

Please note

If you are using Word 2007 (and presumably later), you may not be able to type the @1, @2, @3 keystrokes. If that is the case you will need to disable sequence checking (File > Options > Advanced > Editing options > Use sequence checking > Type and replace).

Choose which download you wish, either the US or UK keyboard layout. Download and unzip the zip file to an easy-to-remember location on your hard drive (if you are uncertain what to do with a .zip file, see Decompression Utilities, Downloading & Font Installation Tips). Installation instructions and the keyboard layout are available in the IPA Unicode 6.2 (ver 1.4) MSK.pdf. If you installed an older version such as, IPA (Custom) 1.0 keyboard you must follow the uninstall instructions and reboot your computer before you install this keyboard.

We now provide a Brazilian Portuguese IPA keyboard. The documentation is in Portuguese and the keyboard itself is associated with PT Portuguese (Brazil) language. Download and unzip the zip file to an easy-to-remember location on your hard drive (if you are uncertain what to do with a .zip file, see Decompression Utilities, Downloading & Font Installation Tips). Installation instructions and the keyboard layout are available in the IPA Unicode 6.2 (ver 1.4 BR).pdf.

We now provide a French IPA keyboard. The FR keyboard is new and has only been minimally tested. We welcome feedback. The documentation is in English (we welcome volunteers to help us translate the documentation!) and the keyboard itself is associated with IU Inuktitut (Latin, Canada) language. Download and unzip the zip file to an easy-to-remember location on your hard drive (if you are uncertain what to do with a .zip file, see Decompression Utilities, Downloading & Font Installation Tips). Installation instructions and the keyboard layout are available in the IPA Unicode 6.2 (ver 1.4 FR).pdf.

We now provide a German IPA keyboard. The GE keyboard is new and has only been minimally tested. We welcome feedback. The documentation is in English (we welcome volunteers to help us translate the documentation!) and the keyboard itself is associated with Icelandic language. Download and unzip the zip file to an easy-to-remember location on your hard drive (if you are uncertain what to do with a .zip file, see Decompression Utilities, Downloading & Font Installation Tips). Installation instructions and the keyboard layout are available in the IPA Unicode 6.2 (ver 1.4 DE).pdf.

You may just download the documentation if you wish. In an appendix, this document contains a chart of all IPA characters, IPA numbers and, where available, their Unicode equivalences. It is made available as a separate download for those who wish to use this resource without the keyboard.

This is a one-page keyboard reference that is also a quick IPA reference chart. It's organized and color-coded by place of articulation. For serious use, please see the home page: http://tiki.lingtransoft.info/ipa. That page contains English, Indonesian and Spanish charts as well as source files.

Other (non-SIL) Windows Keyboards

Unicode Phonetic Keyboard from the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics at University College London. This is an installable keyboard for Windows which uses SAMPA key coding for the SIL Unicode Roman fonts.

The keyboard in its present state is specific to the “Doulos SIL” and "Charis SIL" fonts, in that it references characters in the private use area. In future releases of Doulos SIL and Charis SIL, a number of these characters are expected to appear in standard positions according to the newest Unicode specification, and the keyboard (and encodings of any documents using those characters) will have to be changed accordingly. This note does not, of course, affect standard (non-PUA) Unicode IPA characters. The keyboard supports up to Unicode 6.2.

Mac OS X Keyboards

These downloads contain Macintosh keyboards for typing IPA characters, compatible with Unicode 5.1. These keyboards are for Mac OS X and above. Documentation is included in some packages.

IPA Unicode Macintosh Keyboard

This software and documentation is distributed as freeware. You may modify it, but please change the filename(s).

Note

The IPA Unicode Macintosh Keyboard in its present state is specific to the “Doulos SIL” and "Charis SIL" fonts, in that it references characters in the private use area. In future releases of Doulos SIL and Charis SIL, a number of these characters are expected to appear in standard positions according to the newest Unicode specification, and the keyboard (and encodings of any documents using those characters) will have to be changed accordingly. This does not, of course, affect standard (non-PUA) Unicode IPA characters. The keyboard now supports Unicode 6.2.

IPA Palette IPA Unicode Input Method for Mac OS X 10.2 (‘Jaguar’) and later. A free Unicode character palette input method for the International Phonetic Alphabet. This palette is compatible with the Hiragino font shipped with Mac OS, the (Doulos SIL) font supplied by SIL, and other IPA Unicode fonts. The software enables point-and-click character entry into Unicode-compliant software under Mac OS X.

Related Mac OS X Resources

KeyLayoutMaker:Jonathan Kew, 2006-06-01KeyLayoutMaker is a Perl script designed to create Mac OS X keyboard layout files, based on simple lists of keystrokes and required Unicode characters. It is particularly suited to creating layouts for syllabic scripts.

UkeleleJohn Brownie, 2019-01-18Ukelele is a Unicode keyboard layout editor for Mac OS X versions 10.2 and later. The latest version, 3.3, is available for download, and can be used on Mac OS X 10.9 and later. The previous stable releases of Ukelele, version 3.2.7 (for Mac OS X 10.8 and later), version 2.2.8 (universal binary, for Mac OS 10.4 and later) and version 1.8.4 (universal binary, for Mac OS X 10.2 and later) are still available for download. This version works on Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) and later.

IPAChartApp for iOS 8 and above

IPAChartApp for iOS 8 and above — International Phonetic Alphabet in your email, tweet or Facebook post! IPAChartApp gives you an International Phonetic Alphabet keyboard you can use on any iOS app. Organized according to the 7 official IPA charts, it will be immediately familiar. Stack diacritics to your heart's content!

Related Resources

IPA Transcription with SIL FontsSIL Linguistics Department and NRSI staff, 2012-05-18SIL International has produced several font sets over the years that allow for the transcription of linguistic data using the International Phonetic Alphabet. This page should help the user decide to use Unicode fonts. It provides links to many relevant resources (choosing fonts, finding keyboarding solutions, figuring appropriate Unicode codepoints, data conversion, etc) with regard to the International Phonetic Alphabet.